- Yevgeny Bazhanov explores the “triangle” of geopolitical relations between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow, while over at Global Europe Shada Islam suggests that the EU must redoubled efforts to improve engagement with Asia.

- In the first of a new column on international affairs, Shashi Tharoor, former Indian Minister of State for External Affairs, explores the importance of internationalism in foreign policy and why it “has always been a vital part of [the Indian] national DNA”. The economist Jagdish Bhagwati, meanwhile, assesses US-Indian tensions at the heart of the Doha Round and the prospects of reinvigorating the trade talks.

- Elsewhere, in The Walrus John Schram has an in-depth account of Ghana’s post-colonial transition and how its democratic experience provides an example to other African countries.

- Finally, Keith Simpson, William Hague’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, presents his annual offering of summer reading in foreign affairs. Iain Dale has the full list here.

This video interview shows Derick Ashong, an Obama supporter, getting approached by a (presumably pro-Clinton) interviewer outside Obama and Clinton’s third debate in February last year.  Here’s how the New York Times described what happened next:

“So why are you for Obama?” he asked. It was clear from his approach that he expected a dimwitted answer, an expectation that he was about to talk to another acolyte smitten by Senator Obama’s rock star persona.

But, as it turned out, Mr. Ashong, who was raised in Ghana and elsewhere, was glad to be asked. For almost six minutes — about a century in broadcast television years — Mr. Ashong, who has an immigrant’s love of democracy and the furrowed brow of a Brookings fellow, held forth on universal health care, single-payer approaches and public-private partnerships.

“A lot of these H.M.O.’s are publicly traded companies anyway, but I don’t think we want to create a market for health care per se, like we don’t want to create a futures market in health care,” he said. And so on.

Cute stuff. Highly informative. But not the kind of political discourse that generally captures a wider audience.

But here’s the weird part. On Feb. 2, the interview of Mr. Ashong was posted on a YouTube channel called “The Latest Controversy,” where supporters of both Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Obama are asked very aggressively to justify their choice of candidates. The video blew up, drawing more than 850,000 views. And after that huge response to his policy analysis, Mr. Ashong decided to double down and explain the emotional component of his support for Obama in a follow-up video that was posted Feb. 11 and received 300,000 views.

Taken together, that means a guy who was looking to (anonymously) show a little love for a candidate was able to look into the camera for more than 13 minutes combined and draw in more than a million clicks with an impassioned but reasoned pitch.

Ashong will be in the UK next month, and speaking at a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues.  Details: 6.30pm on 26 February in the Grand Committee Room in Parliament. More from the NYT piece after the jump.

At a time when politics and popular culture are still in an awkward mating ritual, Mr. Ashong inadvertently tapped into the youthquake that is shaking up the campaign. While the clip could have been lost among some of the popular rubble at YouTube (“Let me see, do I watch a tutorial on health care or Tori Spelling on ‘Jimmy Kimmel’?”), Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic blogged about it, as did Think on These Things, a political blog. Then The Economist chimed in, which led to an editor at The New York Times hearing about it and — well, you get the idea.

Part of what is under way has to do with a subversion of expectations. Watch broadcast news and you will see any number of man-on-the-street interviews. In this trope, a person with good hair solicits an enthusiastic sound bite from a supporter, pats her on the head and then moves on. But in this instance, neither party played by the rules. The journalist is never seen and is extremely aggressive in asking questions, while the subject, Mr. Ashong, does not so much take the bait as reel in the guy setting it out there.

“What you have here is two amateurs who are not acting like what they represent,” said Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “The ‘reporter’ is very probing, and then the ‘subject’ gives as good as he gets. It is a classic viral moment.” 

Ghana is important not just because it is one of very few West African countries that is not mired in corruption, civil strife and abject poverty (although there is plenty of the latter and not a little of the former if you look hard enough). It is also one of only a handful of countries on the entire continent that has regular peaceful democratic elections (it has had five since 1992). After the debacles in Kenya and Zimbabwe in the last two years, and after the recent coups in Guinea and Mauritania, it is crucial that Ghana’s poll passes off peacefully.

So far, there has been relatively little unrest, but as Chris Blattman reports, tensions are rising by the day:

My friend Naunihal sends me this dispatch, cobbled together hastily this afternoon (he urges me to tell you):

The situation is starting to look like Bush v. Gore. The election commissioner just said that the opposition leads by 23,000 votes and that there is one constituency where there was no election for security reasons which has over 50,000 votes that will vote just after new years.

But it gets messier. The incumbent party (NPP) points out that 2 big constituencies in Kumasi (its key area of support) were not included in the officially counted votes (probably because they are contested) and that it won one of those by over 51,000 votes.

In addition, they point out that in 11 constituencies in the opposition’s key area of the Volta region, NPP poling agents were thrown out and did not sign the election returns. I’ve seen the violence done to one of the party election observers – he was beaten and stoned and may lose his eye.

Right now fear is running high in Accra. Makola Market, the main market, is closed because of fear of violence. I’m getting reports right now from people aligned with the NPP, so I’m only hearing about NDC “Machomen” riding around in empty streets.

The constituency that has yet to vote for the President, voted against the incumbent party at the Parliamentary level, thus kicking out the incumbent MP. So it looks good for the opposition in that area, but everything is really too close to call.

And rumors are spreading that the election commissioner is under pressure from the incumbent government to throw things their way.

None of this is good in terms of street level tensions and legitimacy for whichever candidate gets declared.

Update: Fortunately, the election concluded peacefully, as Nana Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party graciously conceded defeat to John Atta Mills’ National Democratic Congress. A rare example of a peaceful democratic transition, then, from one African party to another, and further evidence that Ghana really is a beacon of hope for the region. Let’s hope leaders in other parts of the continent take note.

As well as the above three countries and Sierra Leone, which I wrote about in July, a researcher who works for Kofi Annan claims that Ghana has become another hub for the drug deluge, which he believes will affect the country’s current election campaign. Here’s a helpful map of West Africa’s Cocaine Coast – expect Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire, which like Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau are struggling to rebuild after devastating wars and which are surrounded by drug havens, to be next.

Nick Stern sidles up to these questions in his paper – Key Elements of a Global Deal on Climate Change. His starting point is that global emissions need to drop to around 20 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (and then further to around 10GT CO2e in the decades that follow) – that’s around 2 tonnes of CO2e in 2050 for each of the world’s 9 billion people or so.

Stern believes that there is no choice but for countries to converge on this per capita average:

This target for per capita emissions by mid-century is so low that there is little scope for any major country to depart significantly above or below it. If one or two large countries were to manage only to reduce emissions to, say, 3T or 4T per capita, then it would be difficult to see which other major grouping of countries would be able to get emissions close to zero: and the global target would be unlikely to be reached.

So…let’s imagine the Americans have accepted this logic (suspend belief for a moment) and have a proposal for reducing their emissions from over 20T today to Stern’s 2T by 2050. They enter the negotiating room expecting other countries to do the same.

How would you advise China, India or Ghana to respond? They start from a very different point – around 5T per Chinese citizen, 2T for an Indian, and maybe around 1/2 tonne for a Ghanaian.

Now, as Stern admits, for them, simple convergence would be a pretty rough deal.

All major groups getting to 2T/capita is a pragmatic approach and not a strongly equitable one. It takes little account of the greater per capita contributions of the developed countries to the historical and future contributions to the stock of GHG emissions.

My instinct would be to urge the Chinese, Indians and Ghanaian to forgo what might be a fun, but ultimately unproductive, squabble about historical emissions. Be magnanimous about the past, I’d suggest. Instead focus on what really matters – who’s going to be allowed to emit what over the next forty years.

Because however far Chinese, Indian or Ghanaian emissions are allowed to increase before they start to drop towards 2T – its absolutely certain that their total emissions between now and 2050 (on a per capita basis) will be significantly lower than America’s.

In other words, there’s no trajectory that can be drawn that gives these countries a fair share of the next generation emissions ‘cake’.

So what deal would you advise them to strike?

Such measures have been widely criticised, but they are not new. I recently came across FJ Pedler’s ‘Economic Geography of West Africa’, published by Longmans in 1955. Among many other interesting topics, he writes about the maize shortages of 1947. He notes the wildly fluctuating price of guinea-corn in the Zaria region of Nigeria, which rose from £8 per ton in 1946 to £38 per ton a year later. “These price movements,” he says, “are an indication that too little food is produced to meet the needs of the people throughout the year.” Traders take advantage of this, buying up food at harvest time to sell it later when prices rise (a bit like today’s commodities traders, who have been stocking up on food): “They are often blamed for high prices and scarcity [plus ça change...], but their action is the result of shortage, not the cause of it.”

As in today’s crisis, Mr Pedler reports that governments “often get frightened by the high prices and shortages…and prohibit the movement of food from one place to another.” Like Burkina Faso today, West African governments in the 1950s banned the export of guinea-corn from one state to another – in this case, from Katsina Province into Zaria Province. It didn’t help then either, and Pedler explains why the approach is flawed:

It is difficult to defend these bans on economic grounds. If they are effective, they prevent food from moving to the place where people will pay most for it. This must drive prices even higher in the needy area: while in the producing area an artificially low price is maintained, so that there is less economic incentive for farmers to increase their production.

Little has been learnt, it seems, in the intervening half-century. However, as Mr Pedler observed back then, the bans are easily evaded; “their principal effect is to add to the cost of transport by making it necessary for traders to avoid control posts or bribe the guards.” Good news for the corrupt, then, but bad news for the hungry.

Africa’s cocoa makes the world’s chocolate, its fish, fruit and vegetables reach tables around the globe and its oil powers vehicles and factories from China to the United States. Yet far from benefiting from soaring commodity prices, African states are being squeezed as hard as any by the costs of fuel and food imports. Their desperate moves to cushion the impact for potentially restive populations threaten to wreck already stretched budgets, slashing receipts and swelling state spending.

As far as I can tell from the rough tally I’ve been keeping over the last few months, west Africa’s been one of the regions hardest hit by civil unrest related to food and fuel inflation, and Pascal’s article seems to confirm this.  As a result, many governments have been under pressure to subsidise prices for both.  Problem is, that doesn’t do their exchequers any good at all – quite apart from the inflationary impact of such measures.

The unplanned contingency measures, on top of global food and oil prices far above what most imagined a year ago, are wreaking havoc with governments’ finances. “This trend is throwing the budget out of gear,” Ghana’s President John Kufuor lamented last month when he unveiled a package of actions to mitigate the price rises …

As I argue in Pascal’s piece, the expense of subsiding goods across the whole economy, coupled with the inflationary impact, are two of the reasons for the current enthusiasm for social protection systems – be they food aid, vouchers or straightforward cash transfers – that are targeted at the poorest people.  Expect to hear a lot about such ‘social protection systems’ at this week’s UN food summit. 

But there’s a catch, too: in many places, the infrastructure for administering these systems just isn’t in place.  Helping countries to get it set up has to be a top priority for donors – starting right now.

The FT’s Matthew Green explains:

Only a few crumbs were left on the counter at the Boulangerie du Rail delicatessen in Douala after looters swept the shelves of cake, croissants and champagne… “People are hungry, they have nothing to eat,” said Felix Djoyo, the manager, who had locked himself behind a metal door while shanty dwellers ransacked his bottles of Bordeaux.

The crisis in Cameroon might have generated few headlines abroad, but the violence shows how soaring oil and food prices on global markets are threatening the patronage systems propping up some of Africa’s longest-serving leaders.  Protests linked to surging inflation have broken out in Guinea and Burkina Faso in recent months, where presidents have ruled for more than two decades. Niger, Ghana and Senegal have also seen demonstrations …

The government has agreed to a small reduction in fuel prices to placate protesters, saying it cannot afford the kinds of subsidies needed to shield the economy from global market forces. But many residents blame Mr Biya for the hardship, saying years of venal rule have skewed the economy to favour a tiny elite.

So, another point to add to the growing list of what rising food and energy prices mean for Africa: patronage systems come under increasing stress in conditions of scarcity.  Look at Kenya.  People at the tops of agencies are acutely aware of the problem – DFID’s Douglas Alexander and the World Bank’s Bob Zoellick both returned from Davos fired up about the political impacts of scarcity issues, for instance.  Some people in country offices get it, too. 

But the underlying problem is still that many donor agencies’ culture is all about disbursing cash - rather than having a really sophisticated analysis of endogenous drivers of change and a theory of influence to go with it.  Neither the old problem of patronage nor the newer problem of scarcity issues is really that well understood in donor agency cultures.  We’d better hope they get up to speed pretty fast…